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About The Last Great Road Bum: A Novel
Product Description One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020. Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville’s Favorite Books of 2020. In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum.A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson’s freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador―a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism.The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live―a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off. Review Praise for The Last Great Road Bum“[A] hybrid narrative of travel, rebellion, swagger, restlessness and indignation... Some younger writers and readers may not realize how big a pile of yellowing paper a life of writing could amount to in a world before computers and random-access memory. In Joe Sanderson’s case it was monumental, an enormous task to sort through, and Tobar became a ruminative Rumpelstiltskin, spinning this straw into gold.” ―Paul Theroux, The New York Times Book Review“A remarkably juicy true story… [Joe Sanderson’s] death - at age 39 - should be tragic and terrible, yet in Mr. Tobar’s hands it reads like a triumphant arrival.” ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal“While Joe is collecting material for his unwritten novel and attempting to find a suitable voice, he is also engaged in a process that Tobar considers far more important, especially in our bewildering present moment, when writing often seems to be entirely about the privilege of self-discovery. Joe is beginning to discover not just the relationship between the world and his aesthetic impulses, but also the bloody, vital interplay between writing, politics, and the world, with the ensuing dialectic of failure and hope that forms the subject of Tobar’s own novel . . . Tobar’s flawed and human hero stands out with surprising clarity.” ―Siddhartha Deb, The New Republic“A sweeping story of an innocent abroad...The writing is...immersive...The authority, the sense of place, the keen eye for detail...it’s nearly impossible to tell where the line between fiction and non begins and ends. No matter. One of the book’s pleasures is that the line is gleefully crossed...The cross-cultural connection is the book’s greatest achievement… The Last Great Road Bum does what every American novel, great or otherwise, ought to do - it broadens our understanding of America.” ―Robert Rea, The Southwest Review“A very different type of road narrative . . . Tobar granted Sanderson, perennially viewed as an outsider what eludes so many journeying narratives: a sense of belonging."―Connor Goodwin, The Atlantic“Héctor Tobar uses every method at his disposal to encircle the facts of the ‘conspicuous gringo’ whose archive landed in his lap. I’m in awe of the results, an alchemical amalgam of tender portraiture and illuminating context, with a voice full of riffs and references, and charming as hell. Tobar can seemingly do anything as a writer; here he bridges fiction and nonfiction effortlessly.” ―Jonathan Lethem“Tobar’s stunning follow-up to Deep Down Dark draws
